Crawl Diagnostics - unexpected results

[nordichouse]

I received my first Crawl Diagnostics report last night on my dynamic ecommerce site.

It showed errors on generated URLs which simply are not produced anywhere when running on my live site. Only when running on my  local development server.

It appears that the Crawler doesn't think that it's running on the live site.

For example

http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/candlestick-centrepiece-p-1140.html

will go to  a Product Not Found page, and therefore Duplicate Content errors are produced.

Running

http://www.nhlocal.co.uk/candlestick-centrepiece-p-1140.html

produces the correct product page and not a Product Not Found page

Any thoughts?

[donford]

Hi nordichouse,

You may want to check with your CMS provider. The urls are similar to Oscommerce which I'm experienced with, but I can see that isn't an Oscommerce setup. The system should have some sort of URL re-writer to deal with this problem.

The issue that I see is the system actually doesn't care what you type in between .co.uk/ and -p-1140.html

For example try this url to get a valid product..

http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/nipple-clips-p-1000.html
which is the same as
http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/-p-1000.html
But should 301 redirect to: http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/linen-style-collection-p-1000.html

Oscommerce has a URL 301 re-writer that prevents the system for using incorrect URL's I would hope your system does as well.

I'm not trying to avoid helping you, but the without an exact knowledge of how the system handles URL's it generates it is hard to troubleshoot, however since it is a CMS somebody who works on it should already have this knowledge.

My best,

Don

[nordichouse]

Thanks, Don

You are right in your analysis - it is osC, but highly modified by myself. Yes, it does redirect.

That, however, is not the point.  On the live site, the URL containing 1140 (for example) is never generated.

The mystery is how the Crawler can find something that isn't there! Magic.

Alan

[donford]

Did you ever have a product with the id of 1140? If you look at your products table just check the auto number in the product_id column..

If you did and it was live at some point it could be finding the old product based on the old url it used to have.

If you never made that product live then I don't know how a crawler could of found a product that doesn't exist unless they starting using some technology that I'm unaware of.

Since you said you use OSC this what we use to deal with the problem I outlined above..

Begin Ultimate SEO V2.2d

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

# RewriteBase instructions
  # Change RewriteBase dependent on how your shop is accessed as below.
  # http://www.mysite.com = RewriteBase /
  # http://www.mysite.com/catalog/ = RewriteBase /catalog/ 
  # http://www.mysite.com/catalog/shop/ = RewriteBase /catalog/shop/

# Change the following line using the instructions above 
 
RewriteBase /catalog/

RewriteRule ^(.)-p-(.).html$ product_info.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-c-(.).html$ index.php?cPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-m-(.).html$ index.php?manufacturers_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pi-(.).html$ popup_image.php?pID=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-by-(.).html$ all-products.php?fl=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-t-(.).html$ articles.php?tPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-a-(.).html$ article_info.php?articles_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-au-(.).html$ articles.php?authors_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
#RewriteRule ^(.)-pr-(.).html$ product_reviews.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pri-(.).html$ product_reviews_info.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-f-(.).html$ faqdesk_info.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fc-(.).html$ faqdesk_index.php?faqPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fri-(.).html$ faqdesk_reviews_info.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fra-(.).html$ faqdesk_reviews_article.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-i-(.).html$ information.php?info_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-links-(.).html$ links.php?lPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pm-([0-9]+).html$ info_pages.php?pages_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-n-(.).html$ newsdesk_info.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nc-(.).html$ newsdesk_index.php?newsPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nri-(.).html$ newsdesk_reviews_info.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nra-(.).html$ newsdesk_reviews_article.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-po-([0-9]+).html$ pollbooth.php?pollid=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}

End Ultimate SEO V2.2d

You may try it to see if it helps fix your issue.

[nordichouse]

Don

Yes, that is how it is done and there is no problem with that. The above is just how inbound URLs get processed.

The issue here is how the crawler works. The only possible way for this particular URL to be generated is for a certain parameter to be appended to the URL - and that would be unusual (unless SEOmoz techies tell me different)

Alan

[donford]

Hi Nordichouse,

Sorry it took awhile for me to get back to you on this.

I agree with  the SEOmoz techs, it doesn't matter if it is a crawler or a actual person, if you go to an invalid url you should be redirected as 301 to the actual page. If the product doesn't exist it should not allow for superfluous urls.

So basically what you should have is if the product exist then the site redirects to the correct URL. If it doesn't exist then send any query for that product to the same page and display the oscommerce product not found message. By doing this you prevent the system from creating upteenthousand urls for each product.

If you want to test what I mean you can visit our store a www.rubberstore.com/catalog and try a few urls like:

catalog/nipple-clips-p-1000.html
we don't have a product with the id of 1000 so you'll get redirected to the not found message and the root page
-p-1000.html

however if you try:
catalog/a-fake-url-p-29.html
you'll get redirected to our actual product page matching this product id.

Hope that makes since. All this is done with the .htaccess url re-writter I posted above.